Sushmita Pathak

When her father got hurt, a 15-year-old Indian girl used their last $20 to buy a rickety, hot pink bicycle, and pedaled him more than 700 miles to their home village across India — in a heroic, life-saving ride while under coronavirus lockdown.

The story of Jyoti Kumari's epic bike ride has made her a media celebrity, prompted praise from Ivanka Trump — and launched a debate about whether the real story is the fact that the teenager felt she had no other way to get her father to safety.

With India under a nationwide lockdown and religious gatherings banned, Islamic clerics are urging Muslims to observe this weekend's Eid al-Fitr holiday, marking the end of Ramadan, at home with social distancing.

When liquor stores reopened across India on Monday for the first time in nearly six weeks, little circles painted on the pavement were supposed to help customers maintain a safe distance. But Indians paid them little heed.

Bollywood actor Irrfan Khan — a descendant of northern Indian royals, who acted in soap operas before starring in dozens of Hindi-language films and crossover hits like Slumdog Millionaire — has died in Mumbai at age 54. His spokesman, Ahmed Khan (no relation), confirmed the death to NPR.

The actor died Wednesday at a hospital in Mumbai, after being admitted for a colon infection. He had also undergone treatment for a rare type of neuroendocrine cancer.

All his life, 56-year-old Pratap Singh Bora has been sticking his thumb in ink to sign documents. He didn't go to school when he was a kid. Little did he know that he would learn to write his first words at a coronavirus lockdown center during a global pandemic.

On the first day of India's coronavirus lockdown a month ago, Amar Sankrit realized he couldn't get to work.

Sankrit, 21, normally rides a bus two hours each way to a call center outside New Delhi where he has worked for the past year. His company handles customer service queries for U.S. and U.K. telecom companies.

But on March 25, all public transit was halted. He didn't own a laptop, so he couldn't work from home. He worried about losing pay. On a salary of about $3,000 a year, Sankrit helps support his mother.

The world's biggest coronavirus lockdown has been extended for 19 more days.

India's 1.3 billion residents have been under lockdown for the past three weeks. Restrictions were set to expire at midnight Tuesday (2:30 p.m. ET). But in a televised address to the nation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that Indians will have to stay home through May 3.

In India, the coronavirus cloud has a silver lining: clear blue skies.

India entered the world's biggest lockdown last month and the government ordered 1.3 billion people to stay home as the number of coronavirus cases climbed.

With a fraction of the hospital beds and ventilators per capita of developed countries, Indian doctors and public health experts warn an explosion of coronavirus cases could overwhelm their hospitals on a greater scale than what's happening in Italy and the United States — and lead to many millions of deaths.

Not enough toilets – and the ones there are often dirty. Beds crammed together. The only way to shower is with water from a bucket that everyone has to share. No soap or hand sanitizer.

A fresh wave of protests spread across India's biggest cities Monday, hours after masked assailants invaded dormitories on an elite university campus in the capital New Delhi and beat up students and faculty.

At the edge of a tree-lined lane in Mumbai, India, Abdul Kareem opens the hood of his taxi and pours water into the radiator. The car is black with a yellow roof, like all Mumbai cabs. But it stands out in a line of cars.

It's antique-looking and kind of boxy, with bulbous headlights. It has a metal luggage rack on its roof that proclaims "Mumbai" in bright orange lettering. On the streets, Kareem says, people point out the taxi to their kids.

On Nov. 27, a veterinarian in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad called her family to say she'd gotten a flat tire on the side of the road. A truck driver was helping her, and she'd be home soon, she told her sister.

A few days later, police found her charred remains in a wooded area. Authorities believe four men deflated her tire, posed as good Samaritans to trick her, then gang-raped and murdered her. Police said they have DNA evidence connecting them to the crime.